Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What should I name my Wordpress homepage?
-
I work almost exclusively in wordpress now. And I always hesitate when it comes to naming a site's homepage. I have to give it a name - right? I usually pick the business name or /home. And then that is identifies as the site's static homepage in the Wordpress settings and it works just fine.
But I've started to get warning that it is an issue because it creates redirects. For example, I just ran the Ryte service analysis on a website and it warned me about "Non-indexable pages with high relevance" and it's basically my homepage that has 29 incoming links that "passes all pagerank to https://ourdomain/home
But what am I supposed to call my homepage if not "Home"? It's not like the old days where anyone has to type it in. The root domain loads the homepage just as it should.
Can anybody advise me regarding best practices for what to name a Wordpress homepage for good SEO?
With thanks in advance for your help.
-
"The primary domain will definitely resolve to the homepage. My question is fairly Wordpress specific. When you create a new page or post you give it a title. Calling it "home" makes it easy to find on the admin side in the list of pages.
Whatever page I set as the "homepage" in the Wordpress admin settings, then the domain will resolve to that page no matter what I call it. And no one has to add the title as part of the URL or anything after the / to get there.
I could leave off the title of the page completely. It's not ideal for when I hand it off to clients. (People like things to be clearly labeled what they are.) But is that what you are suggesting I always do? "
I would call the homepage "Home" for the clients Because is ideal for breadcrumbs. In some situations especially e-commerce, it might be smart if it's a very well-known brand do use the well-known brand name as a homepage. For instance, switching "Home" with "Bestbuy"
"Home » SEO blog » WordPress » What are breadcrumbs? Why are they important for SEO?"
See: https://yoast.com/breadcrumbs-seo/
the SERPS will show
"Home » SEO blog » WordPress » What are breadcrumbs? Why are they important for SEO?"
<title><strong>This is an example page title</strong> - <strong>Example.com</strong></title>
Yoast SEO offers an easy way to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site via PHP. It will add everything necessary not just to add them to your site, but to get them ready for Google. Just add the following piece of code to your theme where you want them to appear:
`if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) { yoast_breadcrumb( ' ','` `' ); } ?>`
-
If you have old you are I was like example.com/index.html or something like that. You can use this fantastic tool below the one labeled number two it is a miracle tool in my opinion for rewriting URLs U can write in anything in the custom URL and have it added to your htaccess file or nginx config file and you're up and running
-
https://yoast.com/research/permalink-helper.php (love this tool)
-
<label for="struct1">Default
?p=123
</label> -
<label for="struct2">Day and Name
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
</label> -
<label for="struct3">Month and Name
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/
</label> -
<label for="struct4">Category - Name
/%category%/%postname%/
</label> -
<label for="struct5">Numeric
/archives/%post_id%
</label> -
custom you can use /%postname%/ or anything
<label for="struct1"></label><label for="struct2"></label><label for="struct3"></label><label for="struct4"></label><label for="struct6">Custom: or add what you want to change no matter what the URL</label>
RedirectMatch 301 ^//([^/]+)$ https://yoast.com/help/my-redirects-do-not-work//$1
Add the following redirect to the top of your
.htaccess
file:RedirectMatch 301 ^/([^/]+)/.html$ https://homepage.com/$1
Add the following redirect to the top of your
.htaccess
file:RedirectMatch 301 ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(?!page/)(.+)$ https://homepage.com/$4
<form method="post">```
Even for NGINX> <form method="post"> > > Add the following redirect to the NGINX config file: > > ``` > rewrite "^/index.html" https://homepage.com/?p=$ permanent; > ```</form> If you’re moving your WordPress site to an entirely new domain, you’ll need to perform a domain redirect to avoid losing your content’s SEO. These instructions assume that you’ve backed up your site and[ moved it to its new domain](https://wordpress.org/support/article/moving-wordpress/). To perform this redirect, open up your _.htaccess_ file, and add this code to the top: `#Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.COM/$1 [R=301,L]` Use your new domain in place of _newsite.com_, and then save the file. You can also use any of the above-mentioned plugins to accomplish this task, as long as you activate it on your old site. Use your new domain in place of _newsite.com_, and then save the file. You can also use any of the above-mentioned plugins to accomplish this task, as long as you activate it on your old site. * https://wordpress.org/support/article/creating-a-static-front-page/ * https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/how-to-create-a-custom-homepage-in-wordpress/ * **Big photos** * https://i.imgur.com/U3rPAox.png * https://i.imgur.com/IR8plPZ.png * If you like APIs * https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/functionality/custom-front-page-templates/#is_front_page * https://wpengine.com/resources/wordpress-redirects/ Hope this helps & is not to overkill, Tom [IR8plPZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/IR8plPZ.png) [U3rPAox.png](https://i.imgur.com/U3rPAox.png) [GH6TeOJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/GH6TeOJ.png) [1ae8hu6.png](https://i.imgur.com/1ae8hu6.png)
-
-
Thomas is making the right point that you do always want your domain to point to your homepage. How you "name" it depends on the platform you are using. Mine was a Wordpress question. But a traditional website used to call the homepage index.html and the browser or server knows to resolve to that for the homepage.
That's oversimplified, but the point is that it depends on the platform, but regardless of how you get there, you want your domain to go to your homepage.
-
Tom,
I appreciate your reply and attempt to help. But I'm not sure you understand what I am asking. I understand the concept of the root domain and redirect, etc well.
The primary domain, will definitely resolve to the homepage. My question is fairly Wordpress specific. When you create a new page or post you give it a title. Calling it "home" makes it easy to find on the admin side in the list of pages.
Whatever page I set as the "homepage" in the Wordpress admin settings, then the domain will resolve to that page no matter what I call it. And no one has to add the title as part of the URL or anything after the / to get there.
I could leave off the title of the page completely. It's not ideal for when I hand it off to clients. (People like things to be clearly labeled what they are.) But is that what you are suggesting I always do?
-
Is it advisable to make a different name for your homepage and still get it ranked on search Engine? I open a new blog so that is what I want to know.
Thank you.
-
Name it https://ourdomain/
I would be extremely wary of creating a subfolder for the homepage. I would name the page home in the navigation name it whatever the site name is in the title tag.
To learn more about the title tag please read here https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
if you are thinking of re-creating your URL structure in the same manner in which you demonstrated that you strongly recommend against it.
people who understand how to navigate websites and there are very many of them will go back to the/ after .com or whatever your URL TLD is I would strongly recommend against using /home unless you are redirecting from your old site to your new site which then I would strongly recommend redirecting both .com/home & .com/ to the same homepage that is simply one "/" after the TLD or .com
I hope that helps,
Tom
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
My homepage redirects to itself?
Hi there - I'm not a SEO so help would be appreciated! Moz is telling me we have a redirect loop but the URLs are the same. https://www.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/ Why is my homepage creating a redirect loop to itself? We use Wordpress and I do not have any redirects listed for our homepage. Could this have something to do with switching to https in April? Thanks, Katherine
Technical SEO | | kmmartin0 -
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
Will deleting Wordpress tags result in 404 errors or anything?
I want to clean up my tags and I'm worried I'm going to look in my webmasters the next day with hundreds of errors. Whats the best way of doing this?
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Wordpress categories causing too many links/duplicate content?
I've just added categories to my wordpress site and some of the posts show in several of the categories. Will this cause me duplicate content problems as I want the category pages to be indexed? Also as I add more categories I'm creating more links on the page. They can't be seen to the user as I have a plugin that creates drop down categories. When I go to 'view source' though all the links are there so google will see lots of links. How can I fix the too many links problem? And should I worry about duplicate content issue?
Technical SEO | | SamCUK1 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | | dballari0 -
What is best practice for redirecting "secondary" domain names?
For sites with multiple top-level domains that have been secured for a business or organization, I'm curious as to what is considered best practice for setting up 301 redirects for secondary domains. Is it best to do the 301 redirects at the registrar level, or the hosting level? So that .net, .biz, or other secondary domains funnel visitors to the correct primary/main domain name. I'm looking for the "best practice" answer and want to avoid duplicate content problems, or penalties from the search engines. I'm not trying to game the system with dozens of domain names, simply the handful of domains that are important to the client. I've seen some registrars recommend hosting secondary domains, and doing redirects from the hosting level (and they use meta refresh for "domain forwarding," which I want to avoid). It seems rather wasteful to set up hosting for a secondary domain and then 301 each URL.
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0